Every night in Ainata, in the Lebanese mountains, a dozen volunteers patrol to monitor the vast hectares of century-old trees threatened by illegal logging, a growing phenomenon in Lebanon.
“Nearly 150 multi-centenary oak trees have been cut” since the beginning of 2022, says Ghandi Rahmé, a municipal police officer from this snowy village nestled at 1,700 meters above sea level.
It shows the huge trunks, the only remnants of trees savagely cut down by traffickers who come in the night, out of sight, equipped with all-terrain vehicles and chainsaws.
The municipality of Ainata, located between northern Lebanon and the eastern plain of the Bekaa, like other Lebanese localities, accuses organized gangs of cutting down multi-hundred-year-old trees such as oak or juniper, to engage in the lucrative traffic of wood.
“These are Lebanese from the surrounding regions”, sometimes “accompanied by Syrian workers”, says Ghandi Rahmé, a 40-year-old with a bushy beard who caught offenders in the act in September.
The traffic has worsened with the economic crisis which has paralyzed Lebanon since 2019: the state being bankrupt, the forest guards, like all the security forces, no longer have the means to carry out enough patrols.
“The massacres committed are frightening,” laments Samir Rahmé, a farmer in his sixties from Aïnata.
Faced with this situation, donors, mostly Lebanese from the diaspora from Ainata, have contributed to finance a team of forest guards.
Since the establishment of night patrols, “we have not seen a single case of illegal felling”, rejoices Samir Rahmé.
Locals point out that when these trees are cut down illegally, they no longer grow back.
But not all municipalities have the luxury of receiving financial assistance to hire rangers, even temporary ones.
“The budget allocated to us by the state has become derisory,” says Ghassan Geagea, mayor of the neighboring village, Barqa.
Even if he plans to ask the inhabitants to finance the patrols, the mayor doubts the effectiveness of such an approach, “given the scale of the phenomenon”.
Because offenders are rampant in the remote heights of Barqa, where thousand-year-old junipers have been felled.
In Lebanon, the forest area, already eaten away by growing urbanization and fires, covers 13% of the territory, according to the Ministry of Agriculture.
And to allow the inhabitants to keep warm in winter, only the pruning of “sick” trees is authorized, with the supervision of the town hall of the village.
Paul Abi Rached, president of the NGO Terre Liban, recently sounded the alarm by denouncing the multiplication of “ecological massacres”, in particular the felling of junipers, across Lebanon.
According to the Ministry of the Environment, the country is home to the most important forests in the Middle East of this thousand-year-old tree, as well as forests of pines, oaks, cedars and firs.
Juniper is “one of the only trees that can grow at high altitudes and retain snow so that water seeps into groundwater,” says Mr. Abi Rached.
But in recent years, its wood has been increasingly coveted by smugglers suspected by residents of reselling it in Lebanon and Syria.
“If we don’t stop the felling of juniper, we are heading towards water shortages and drought,” he warns.
Especially since “its growth is very slow. Outside the reserves, it takes 500 years for it to take the form of a tree”, explains Youssef Tawk, a native of Bécharré in northern Lebanon, where he founded an organization of Environmental Protection.
“Cutting down this tree is a crime. For me it’s like killing a man,” adds the 68-year-old doctor.
For his part, Dany Geagea has been leading awareness campaigns against the felling of juniper for 20 years with the children of his village.
He created near Aïnata, an NGO called “Mamlakat al-lazzab” (“The kingdom of the juniper”) and an eponymous reserve, where he planted around 30,000 junipers.
But since September, “massacres” of junipers have taken place regularly.
“Illegal logging is not new, what is is that now it’s done in an organized way”, regrets the 46-year-old activist, who is not related to the mayor of Barqa.
Even in the rare cases where offenders are arrested, “they are released quickly, without being worried”, he sighs.
“This is Lebanon… Even justice is politicized.”
01/02/2023 09:23:26 – Ainata (Liban) (AFP) © 2023 AFP